Who's Crying Now? Study Shows It's Italian Men

NEW YORK - "Me? Come on. I don't cry," says Skippy Battista, sitting at the bar in Little Italy's Taormina of Mulberry St. Restaurant.

But how can that be? A new study shows that Italian men cry more than their counterparts in 28 countries. We're here to investigate.

Joined by colleagues around the globe, Vassar psychology professor Randy Cornelius interviewed hundreds of men and women about their weeping habits. He asked how often they had cried in the last four weeks, and what had triggered their tears.

"This was the first study of its kind to examine crying as close to worldwide as we could get," Cornelius says.

Turns out that Turkish women are right up there with Italian men when it comes to sobbing.

And Americans are among the top three for both male and female boo-hooing: U.S gals are third, with 3.55 cries per month, just behind Chile and ahead of Sweden. U.S. men are No. 2 (just ahead of Austria), with 1.88 cries in the past month.

So much for the Marlboro Man mystique.

Women still universally cry more than men - women because they are in a conflict situation, men when they suffer loss or see others suffer.

The least weepy ladies live in Kenya, Bulgaria and Peru. Their stiff-lipped male counterparts can be found in Spain, Peru and Bulgaria.

What does this strange, non-emoting Bulgarian/Peruvian connection tell us?

"These countries seem to have very low frequencies of crying and, well, nothing else in common," Cornelius concedes.